Originally Posted by
bingoman:
“Just out of curiosity can the Fuel Sensors be tampered with while on the car because it seems odd that all the other teams have had no Problems with sensors just Red Bull
”
Just watching
THIS and it seems Perez's f/m was non-functional for the entire race.
The consensus seems to be that most, if not all, the teams are seeing variations between what the f/m shows and what the engine-management says but what everybody else chose to do was add an offset (or "fiddle factor") to the engine-management readings to govern fuel-flow when/if the f/m went wrong.
So, for example, if a car was going flat-out along a straight (with an apparently functional f/m) and the FIA f/m was reading 99.6 kg/hr, the team's EM system might be saying they're using 94.6 kg/hr.
If the team
then notices, at some point, that on the same bit of track, the f/m is reading 101.8 kg/hr when the EM says they're
now using 93.4 kg/hr then the team can assume that the f/m has developed an inaccuracy and fall back an using their EM system to ensure compliance with the rule.
They'd look at the time when the f/m was considered to be working properly, realise that there was a 5kg/hr difference between the f/m and EM readings (99.6 - 94.6) and then add that to the current EM reading to get the theoretical true reading.
So, 93.4 + 5 = 98.4 kg/hr, which means the car is still within the rules even though the f/m has started saying it's breaking the rule.
In DR's case, it seems that RBR are saying that they noticed the f/m was drifting away from what the EM telemetry was saying and they
did go through the motions of applying an offset to the EM readings and use that to control the fuel-flow but the FIA are saying that they don't think the f/m
was actually faulty.
Trouble is, RBR certainly
are capable of deliberately generating a situation which might undermine the credibility of the f/m so they can claim it's faulty and use that as an excuse to ignore it but, then again, it's up to the FIA to provide a tool that's robust enough not to be susceptible to those kind of shenanigans.